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A post today on Slash­dot got me think­ing about adver­tis­ing. Specif­i­cally adver­tis­ing on the inter­net, but also adver­tis­ing in general.

The arti­cle linked off the Slash­dot post was writ­ten by a man named Jim Lynch, a long time writer in tech­nol­ogy media both dig­i­tal and print. Mr. Lynch is appar­ently annoyed by a new fea­ture in Apple’s just-released Safari 5 web browser called Reader. Reader is a fea­ture that, when selected by the user, attempts to detect “arti­cle” con­tent on a web page and dis­play it in a sim­ple for­mat which is larger and often eas­ier to read than the nor­mal web site lay­out. It also attempts to detect multi-page arti­cles and auto­mat­i­cally dis­play fur­ther pages as you scroll down, effec­tively cre­at­ing a “print” view for sites which may lack such things.

What both­ers Mr. Lynch basi­cally comes down to adver­tis­ing. When using Reader, if it works prop­erly all ads are stripped out of the con­tent. More impor­tantly for some, the auto­matic load­ing of the next page means cost-per-impression ads get many less views as they would only show on the first page before the user clicked the Reader button.

I under­stand the key point behind his com­plaint, web sites cost money to run and that has to come from some­where. This site costs me about $275 a year between domain reg­is­tra­tion and server space, and it’s fairly low vol­ume (under­state­ment of the cen­tury, I aver­age less than 40 pageviews a day not count­ing spi­ders). I pay this out of pocket, since for my use the domain is for my email and the VPS is just a place for me to exper­i­ment. As far as I’m con­cerned I’d be pay­ing for them both any­ways, so why not put some­thing there? Obvi­ously that rea­son­ing doesn’t tend to apply out­side the range of per­sonal blogs and the costs are much higher when you start talk­ing real traf­fic lev­els requir­ing real servers rather than a vir­tual slice of one.

Unfor­tu­nately, I can’t help but not feel the slight­est bit of sor­row for adver­tis­ers and those run­ning adver­tis­ing when they com­plain about their ads being blocked. They’ve for the most part brought this on them­selves, by design­ing their ads to be as intru­sive and annoy­ing as pos­si­ble. Web pub­lish­ers have been just as badly a part of the prob­lem, inject­ing ads as if they were con­tent, allow­ing nui­sance ads with auto­play audio/video or var­i­ous popup/under/over win­dows, and in some par­tic­u­larly annoy­ing cases using the con­tent as the ad with Intel­liTXT and the like.

We’ve already seen what the abil­ity to skip ads has done to the tele­vi­sion indus­try. For years they thrived on annoy­ingly loud and repet­i­tive ads which seemed to rely on the “any pub­lic­ity is good pub­lic­ity” the­ory. As soon as the DVR became com­mon the ad mar­ket pretty much fell apart on any­thing peo­ple weren’t watch­ing live. Now that exten­sions like Adblock for Fire­fox and Apple’s new Reader are mak­ing it easy for the aver­age user to dodge ads (rather than us geeks who have been doing it for years) the inter­net ad com­mu­nity fears the same thing happening.

All I have to say is that the inter­net ad indus­try needs to learn from the suc­cess­ful tele­vi­sion ad campaigns.

First and fore­most, DO NOT PISS OFF YOUR POTENTIAL CUSTOMER!!!!!!!!!
If an overly loud and annoy­ing ad comes on the radio or TV, I’ll turn the vol­ume down or change the chan­nel if I don’t really care for what’s on while mak­ing a men­tal note to avoid the adver­tiser if pos­si­ble. The same applies to inter­net ads. If your ad stretches over the con­tent I’m try­ing to read, starts play­ing audio out of nowhere, makes half the words on the page pop up prod­uct links, or oth­er­wise inter­feres with my read­ing of the con­tent I will go out of my way to avoid your prod­uct where pos­si­ble. If ad block­ing is avail­able, I’ll turn it on imme­di­ately when any of those hap­pen and may make a note to avoid the site where it was seen as well.

Sec­ond, draw my eye the right way. You do not have to be loud, either lit­er­ally with audio or fig­u­ra­tively with bright/flashing col­ors. Use your space to make me inter­ested in what you have, then if I actively click on it you can load your con­tent of choice. This is more for adver­tiser rather than pub­lish­ers, but due to point one pub­lish­ers would do well to enforce point two.

Third, be rel­e­vant. If I’m read­ing a site about cars, an ad for purse built to carry small dogs is most likely irrel­e­vant. Again this is for both pub­lish­ers and adver­tis­ers. Ad net­works which do not tar­get based on con­tent are out­dated and should be dropped imme­di­ately from both sides.

Fourth, don’t try to shove too many ads in my face. I myself start get­ting annoyed when there’s more than 3 – 5 ads on the screen at one time, depend­ing on the amount of con­tent and such. Sites that split arti­cles in to a huge num­ber of short pages in order to increase impres­sions for ad pur­poses fall in to the same cat­e­gory (and I believe these sites are the great­est rea­son for the Reader fea­ture). Divid­ing arti­cles in to mul­ti­ple pages is fine, but don’t do it unless you have at least as much infor­ma­tion on a page as an aver­age mag­a­zine. Two para­graphs and a few pic­tures are not a page.

The short ver­sion is pro­vide ads that don’t annoy the reader and prefer­ably are some­thing they might actu­ally want and you won’t have as many block­ing them. If the rel­e­vance goes up, more peo­ple will click on them too. As for the rest, those who have already decided to install full ad block­ers, those are gone already. You won’t get them back, it’s just too nice. Down­load Fire­fox, install Adblock Plus, and sub­scribe to one of the pop­u­lar fil­ter lists like Easylist. Now turn it off and browse to a few pop­u­lar news sites. Turn it back on and reload those pages. If you don’t agree that this is a much cleaner and more enjoy­able way to browse the inter­net you’re blind.

To whom it may concern:

Over the past two days there has been a lot of talk about your new data plans, par­tic­u­larly the removal of the “unlim­ited” option. While I believe there should be a third tier for the heav­ier users, I can under­stand the rea­sons for mov­ing to an entirely metered struc­ture and do not have any prob­lems with that part. Where I do have a prob­lem is the addi­tional $20 per month charge for users of inter­net tethering.

Before I make my points, let me quote one of your Senior Vice Pres­i­dents, Mark Collins, from his inter­view with GigaOm on the day the new plans were announced.

That capa­bil­ity is enabling some­thing you can’t do today. You can use one device and get mul­ti­ple con­nec­tions so it’s more use­ful to you. You’re going to use more data so the price is based on the value that will be delivered.

This is in response to the ques­tion “What about the $20 teth­er­ing fee? It looks like a con­ve­nience charge.”

That capa­bil­ity is only enabling some­thing you can’t do today because you locked it out in the first place. My AT&T-branded LG CU500 could not tether until I had a teth­er­ing plan, but my unlocked and unbranded Sony K850i could just fine with­out any spe­cial teth­er­ing plans. The Apple iPhone 3G and 3GS both have sup­ported teth­er­ing offi­cially since the release of the 3.0 firmware released nearly a year ago, but this was dis­abled on mod­els sold in the US because you did not want to allow it. Teth­er­ing is not some spe­cial fea­ture you are doing work to enable and deserve to be paid extra for, it’s a fea­ture all of our data-capable phones have built in which you have actively engaged in defeating.

I won’t argue the state­ment that it makes my phone and data plan more use­ful, but again this is a fea­ture that both have inher­ently had from the begin­ning and you have actively sought to remove. If I went to rent a four door sedan and found that the pas­sen­ger side and rear seats had been removed unless I paid an extra fee to have them rein­stalled, I and any other rea­son­able per­son would think that is out­ra­geous. Unfor­tu­nately you are able to take advan­tage of the fact that 99% of your users are not technology-savvy and thus do not know how much they’re being screwed.

The last part of that response is the most illog­i­cal of them all. “You’re going to use more data,” so the price increases with­out the amount of data I’m allowed to use chang­ing in the slight­est? How is me using 2GB in one month on a smart­phone dif­fer­ent from using 2GB in one month teth­er­ing to even a dozen lap­tops? Data is data, one type doesn’t put any extra load on your net­work ver­sus another.

Extra charges for teth­er­ing were accept­able when the alter­na­tive options were smartphone/dumbphone-only unlim­ited pack­ages, since yes, a teth­er­ing user is likely to use more data over­all. How­ever, if I’m already buy­ing a bucket of bits how does it mat­ter at all if I choose to use those to feed my smart­phone directly or down­load some­thing to my laptop?

To close, I have been a cus­tomer of AT&T since port­ing in from T-Mobile’s then ter­ri­ble cov­er­age in 2005. In that time I have at peak car­ried two voice lines, one iPhone data, and one Lap­top­Con­nect at the same time. I know that does not make me any­thing spe­cial, but I’m sure it’s more than most of your sin­gle non-business or fam­ily cus­tomers. I have also defended AT&T as hav­ing the best net­work for geeks due to your use of open GSM tech­nol­ogy and until recently high­est mobile data speeds. As you might guess, I will not be doing this any longer and I will be empha­siz­ing the prob­lems I have with your change to any­one who may ask about your ser­vice. I had been eye­ing the Sprint/HTC Evo 4G for a time while debat­ing mak­ing the switch, I thank you for help­ing me make my deci­sion. You can expect to see my num­ber port out in the near future.

Sin­cerely,
Sean Harlow

Sent via e-mail to Ran­dall Stephen­son, CEO and Mark Collins, VP of Voice and Data

Just some of my favorites from the Every­body Draw Mohammed Day group on Facebook.

South Park Mohammed

Dream­works Mohammed

Rage Car­toons style Mohammed

If the Quran tells Mus­lims not to depict their prophet, that’s fine and I have no prob­lem with them liv­ing by that. When they try to enforce their beliefs on oth­ers is where the line is crossed.

Via Pharyn­gula

Appar­ently Wednes­day night’s episode of South Park was cen­sored by Com­edy Cen­tral after it was deliv­ered. Matt and Trey posted this on the South Park Stu­dios news feed:

In the 14 years we’ve been doing South Park we have never done a show that we couldn’t stand behind. We deliv­ered our ver­sion of the show to Com­edy Cen­tral and they made a deter­mi­na­tion to alter the episode. It wasn’t some meta-joke on our part. Com­edy Cen­tral added the bleeps. In fact, Kyle’s cus­tom­ary final speech was about intim­i­da­tion and fear. It didn’t men­tion Muham­mad at all but it got bleeped too. We’ll be back next week with a whole new show about some­thing com­pletely dif­fer­ent and we’ll see what hap­pens to it.

Com­edy Cen­tral has failed by giv­ing in to a group of idiots who only know how to get what they want through threats. By cen­sor­ing this episode, they showed that those threats will get exactly the desired reac­tion.

Stolen from Some­thing Awful

Sat­ur­day night I was dri­ving home from a friend’s house around 11 PM. I get off I-71 at SR18 like usual and then cut in to a neigh­bor­hood that leads me around to Smith Road so I can bypass all the stop­lights on 18. A few sec­onds later I see head­lights gain­ing on me rapidly which are clearly a Crown Vic­to­ria, and as I come to a stop and the car behind comes up to me, I can see the 800-GRAB-DUI plate up front indi­cat­ing it’s a police car. I turn on to Smith and the car con­tin­ues to fol­low me at a very close dis­tance down a fairly steep hill that I have to ride my brakes on to stay at 25 MPH. Obvi­ously no one ever does 25 MPH down that hill unless they have a cop rid­ing their ass wait­ing for them to speed. (by the way, if I was to have fol­lowed as closely behind that cop as he did behind me I’d have a ticket for tail­gat­ing. why does he get a free pass?)

At the bot­tom of the hill there’s a stop light, I con­tin­ued on straight and the offi­cer behind me turned off back towards route 18. About that time I get a call from a friend of mine who had seen the cop pull in behind me. Appar­ently he had flipped his lights on and cut across three lanes to fol­low me, so my friend thought I had been pulled over. I had made a bit of an aggres­sive turn in to the neigh­bor­hood and it was late on a Sat­ur­day night, so at the time I just fig­ured they were out on DUI patrol and had left once it was clear I wasn’t weav­ing (or even buzzed, I hadn’t drank a drop that day).

I keep going down Smith, then turn down 57 towards my apart­ment. As I pull away from a four-way stop, I see the same Med­ina PD unit that had been fol­low­ing me (I made note of the num­ber) pull up to the other side of the inter­sec­tion and then pull in behind me again. Approach­ing my street, I see a Med­ina Town­ship unit sit­ting in the street with his rear lights on. Com­ing around the cor­ner, there are three other units includ­ing Brunswick PD, Montville PD, and another Med­ina PD car in the park­ing lot of one of the other apart­ment build­ings on my street. The car that was once again fol­low­ing me pulled in behind the Town­ship unit in the street and fired up his lights as well. There is also a mid-90s Cadil­lac in the mid­dle of it all with some younger males stand­ing around it.

At this point I’m of course inter­ested. Rarely do you see five units on scene when noth­ing of inter­est has happened.

Today I fire up the Med­ina City PD Pub­lic Infor­ma­tion Log and pull up the infor­ma­tion for the weekend:

Incident #: 10-004590

Nature of Incident: Traffic Violation

Offense Reported: Traffic-Moving Violation

Time Reported: 23:20:10

Time Occurred Between: 23:20:10 02/20/10 - 23:20:10 02/20/10

Responsible Officer: Lynn S

Complainant:

Incident Address:
Springbrook; 300 Blk
Medina, OH 44256

Narrative:
No plate light

Five units from four agen­cies, two of which are out of their juris­dic­tion, for a license plate light? Really?

Everybody’s friends over at the TSA had a nice fail at some point when they posted a redacted ver­sion of their “Avi­a­tion Secu­rity Screen­ing Man­age­ment Stan­dard Oper­at­ing Pro­ce­dures” on their web site. Unfor­tu­nately for them, redact­ing by draw­ing boxes over the text and images in Acro­bat doesn’t really do any­thing use­ful, the con­tent is still there. It took a few months before some­one noticed, but once that hap­pened the Inter­net took hold and the great guys over at Cryp­tome stripped all the cen­sor­ing, replac­ing it with red boxes to clearly mark what the TSA con­sid­ers “sen­si­tive” and posted the result on their web site. I’m also mir­ror­ing the same here. I’ve skimmed the whole man­ual and read the cen­sored parts in their entirety, I hon­estly can’t fig­ure out why they even felt the need to cen­sor. Gov­ern­ments should be open unless they can pro­vide good rea­son not to be, not closed by default.

If you are see­ing this post, your DNS servers have updated and noticed that my old VPS on JaguarPC is no longer where they should look. My blog and other ran­dom shit has now been moved over to Lin­ode, where they don’t block IRC and other things I run on my box.

Today I had Steam start throw­ing an error that it is being run in com­pat­i­bil­ity mode when I had never set such a thing, nor were either the short­cut or EXE itself flagged for com­pat­i­bil­ity mode. Thanks to a lit­tle googling, I found this thread on the Steam forums which finally had a solution.

Open the reg­istry edi­tor (if you don’t know how to do this, you should not be mess­ing around in the reg­istry) and browse to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AppCompatFlags\Layers. Look for entries in those keys men­tion­ing steam.exe and delete them. Restart Steam and you’re set!

Got back home from the Day­ton Hamven­tion around 8 PM last night. I went there plan­ning on buy­ing an entry-level HT, but I ended up get­ting attracted to shiny things and bought a Yaesu VX-7R rather than my intended tar­get of some­thing in the FT-60R range. Made a few con­tacts on the trip back, unfor­tu­nately I don’t remem­ber many calls or names, the only ones I can recall are Ron (W8RON) and I think another guy both Ron and I talked with was named Kyle, I can’t remem­ber his call.

So I’m finally on the air the “proper” way rather than just being tied to Echolink. Woo!

–KD8JQS